Mr. Big Shot Gmail Thinks It Can Respond to Emails Better Than You

Does this count as catfishing?

May 17, 2017 9:00 am

It can already use your info to recommend the best route home and where to stop along the way, but now Google’s machine learning algorithm wants to help with another mobile pain point: email.

To give on-the-go users using the Android and iOS app versions of Gmail the same option Inbox by Gmail and Allo users have had for years, a feature called Smart Reply will now come standard with the Gmail app.

Using machine learning, the Smart Reply feature analyzes the text of an incoming email and then formulates three suggestions for a response. Users can ignore them, send them as is or add more text and, the more the Smart Reply feature is used, the smarter the responses get.

While the time-saving feature doesn’t sound like it’s all that amazing, Google claims that 12 percent of replies sent from Inbox for mobile came from Smart Reply since its launch in 2015.

And, considering email etiquette in increasingly becoming an issue for those who aren’t old enough to remember a time before texting, emojis and LOLing, maybe having a computer do at least some of the thinking isn’t such a bad thing.

The feature is available in English now and support for Spanish and other languages is coming.

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